Monday, December 7, 2009

Is it Necessary? Mud and Van Gogh's Ear

A friend of my husband's recounted that as a young man he had intended to go to The Art Student's League in NYC, but when he got there everyone was sitting on the floor, and this convinced him it was not the place or the career path for him.  He became an engineer instead.


left: Terrible Tragedy, porcelain paperclay

Last week, in making what will be my new batch of porcelain paperclay, I expressed my dislike for sticking my hands into the thick slurry.  Another clay artist there offered her own hands, saying how much she loved that feeling, how it brought back the happiness of playing with mud as a child.

Did I never play with mud?  All I can remember about mud is how we used it as a balm after bee stings.  My sister and I would rush to the hose, blast it into the nakedest soil we could find, and make mud as fast as possible.  Then we globbed it onto the sting site, where it seemed to deliver some measure of relief.  It was necessary.

below:  Celadon Vase, porcelain paperclay.
That didn't work the time a huge bee landed near my eye.  I stood like a statue, supressing the inclination to outrun the buzzy beast, while my mother cautioned, "Don't run or it will follow and sting you; stay still and it will leave." I can personally attest to that plan being based on false notions.  The bee did leave, but only after stinging.  (Was it angry that my blue eye was not a flower after all?)  That sting caused my eye to swell shut like a tennis ball in a matter of minutes, just in time for the arrival of our dinner guests, two of whom were children.  Their stares told me this evening was going to be seared into their memories, years later coming back up in         conversation as, "Remember the time we went to that family's house and their daughter was a monster with a deformed eye?"  "Oh yeah, I remember that!  That was scary!"  Without the mud balm, it took a week for my eye to fully deflate.

But I digress.  I was writing not about swollen eyes and social disasters, but about whether an artist needs to get down and dirty or what it means to not do so.

My daughter, a budding artist, gets some measure of glee from getting coated with charcoal.  Black streaks smear across her face, hands and arms on a regular basis. It seems her way of proclaiming her artistry to the public.  Does physical intimacy with one's medium lead to better, more powerful art?  It sounds romantic to answer "yes", but I'm not convinced.  My husband has often reported to his colleagues that I could "paint in an evening gown without risking its ruin."  It is true that I rarely emerge from my studio covered in whatever I was working with, and were I to move out of my studio tomorrow, future occupants would likely have trouble discerning what the space had recently been used for.  The floor is not spattered with paint and there is no odor of lingering turpentine.  The main thing I'd leave as evidence is the hundreds of small pushpin and nail holes in the walls, but these are easily filled.

I have been considering the aspect of making art in a state of physical abandonment, but there is also always that sibling state to consider:  the state of mental abandonment.  Here we arrive at Van Gogh's ear.  The big Q:  Was it really necessary for him to experience those emotional imbalances in order to make brilliant paintings?  An artist/psychologist friend of mine who has extensively researched Van Gogh's creativity thinks not.  In fact, he took such offense at my offered birthday game, "Pin the Ear on Van Gogh", that he refused to accept it.  He found no kernels of humor in the game and scolded, "He did NOT cut off his ear!"  (Evidently and possibly only by accident,  he only injured the tip, which produced enough blood to launch the legend.)  The "PUBLIC" seems to desire a certain amount of emotional polarity in artists, and after all it is so much more interesting for a bio to read that an artist cut off body parts in a fit of instability than, "he/she led a calm and balanced life".  Of course, visiting the emotionally dark places is something we as humans must experience sometime, to some degree, but is it necessary for artistic brilliance?  I'm not sure...

If someone who likes to play in the mud is around next time I mix clay, I will again accept their willing hands to do the dirty work.  If not,...I'll get clay under my own fingernails, because it's a necessary step, and someone's got to do it.

Monday, November 2, 2009

The Rumbling Thunder of Creativity




 CLOUD ©Joy Kreves, sumi ink on porcelain
A full storm of creativity is rumbling around the corner.  I can feel its gathering energy, its electric, growing thunder; it's a kettle headed towards the rolling boil.  It will be an immersion in the loud-ish bath of a sparkling, bubbling spring beneath a steady rain.  It will be these things for me

TWO CLOUDS ©Joy Kreves, sumi ink on porcelain

Meanwhile, I am holdng something in mind, something I first found in a little paperback, SELECTED POEMS, chosen at whim from the bookstore years ago.  One poem by Mark Strand remains my all time favorite:


EATING POETRY
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-Mark Strand

When I am under the spell of this poem I believe that a person can truly exist on the creative realm alone, no further nourishment needed; a person really does not need to keep a stocked refrigerator, laundered clothing or a tidy house.  These tasks are just annoying, buzzing flies - distractions from reveling in one's essential being.  I do believe I smell ink now...


Sunday, October 25, 2009

Reading Tea Leaves & Works of Art



Every now and then something happens in my life that seems to have been foreshadowed in my artwork. Admittedly this is magical, but it's also very spooky. Perhaps appropriately timed to the re-emerging Halloween mood, this just happened again.

Recently I created a ceramic wall installation, ("Electron Madness") for an exhibition perhaps ominously titled, "Asking For the Fire". This piece's "issues" seemed to mirror "issues" I was having with a friend at the same time. The amount of red I was using in the piece bothered me all along because it looked too violent and angry, and I spent hours gazing at it, imagining ways to keep red's lure without so much of red's in-your-face fierceness. At the same time I found myself tiptoeing on eggshells around my friend's increasingly unstable violatility. Our once entertaining friendship was turning into a mine field already sprinkled with the remains of many of her other acquaintances.

As was probably inevitable, I somehow did crack an eggshell and she blew up and unleashed a mercurial anger unmatched by anything I've personally witnessed outside of a movie. I have led a sheltered life: a polite Midwestern childhood, an intellectually alert family life, and yes, some of that Midwestern emotional flatness that matches the endless stretches of cornfields that are so much of the Illinois landscape. So this in-your-face redness of my artwork and of her anger was something new to me.

I know that artworks try to tell you things, try to tell you their desires, and you just have to listen and learn to hear them. In "Electron Madness" I listened and wrote our "conversation" on the wall as part of the piece. My art was fighting with me over the theme and direction of the work. It was positively crabby. All of this I recorded in pencil, on the wall. I don't thrive in struggle and most of my artwork leans towards calmness, so this process was not my typical creating process. I got the idea to turn the tone of the piece by very consciously adding small touches of spring green to it. The whole thing did seem to calm down just enough. What a relief! Sadly, I can't say the same thing about that friendship. Whereas I succeeded in taming the fires in my artwork, I did not succeed in tamping the fires of a temper gone awry. I decided to give up on attempting to keep up a friendship with someone so high maintenance. There is that spooky feeling, though...The artwork is finished, the friendship is finished, but did I hear EVERYTHING "Electron Madness" was telling me? It's enough to send shivers down my spine...

"Electron Madness" was born while I was thinking about the science movie, "Down the Rabbit Hole", so I was musing about electrons and time and space in quantum terms. Not that I understand quantum theory well at all mind you, but it interests me. The movie brought up the issue of the directional flow of time, and whether the past and present and future can all exist simultaneously. I wonder: if time passing IS only an illusion, and events from all times actually co-exist, could this be why one's art might reflect one's present and even one's future?

(For the complete text copy of the wall installation "Electron Madness" see the next post. It is also on my website: http://www.joykreves.com/large-single-view/Installation%20Artworks/258954-5-21051/Drawing/Pencil/Expressionist.html

Electron Madness Wall Writing

THE FLOWER REBELLION
“Electrons are the subject of this piece”, I said.
"ELECTRON REVOLT-no- MADNESS... ELECTRON MADNESS."
First they were electrons, moving, crazy, but they all wanted to be red
I gave them a good title: “Electron Madness.” They had their own ideas, though. Before I knew it they were all turning into flowers into pretty little things and soon they were out of control.
I struggled. There was a power grab.
Yes, there was some violence.
They just wanted to manifest manifest manifest.
I tried to discourage them from evolving BUT they had an impulse
To fulfill, a desire, a fate…they were compelled.
“Electrons,” they stated sharply, “are not shy.”
I found them too bold – after all, red is very fierce. (my friend Joan says this)

“Okay,” I said, “but I must maintain control of this piece; I am the artist. So just ONE flower, like an exclamation at the very end. The rest must remain electrons! Well…a second flower snuck itself in and everybody knows you have to have one, three or five, never two or four (unless it’s a very formalist piece) so now there are five… All that red was just disturbing, too. It was all blood and strife
Finally I understood, the flowers taught me this - green always lies beneath red (even symbolically).
When I added bits of lively green
the whole piece breathed relaxed sighed.
The fire of transformation _ GREEN !

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